“People stop thinking when they stop reading” is an interesting expression that makes you think.

This is what great people answer to the question “why is it important to read books”:

Systematic reading of books is:

  1. A great opportunity to escape from worries, “live” a different life, and pass the time. With a book in your hands you can forget about everything in the world.
  2. A unique chance to improve your imagination. In the process of reading, we all draw certain images, pictures that occur according to the plot, and this perfectly trains the brain. It is not surprising that often the most original ideas come precisely after reading interesting literature.
  3. Guarantee of good mental health. With such passion nervous system will always be in perfect order, There is no risk of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, you will forget about stress and depression.
  4. The key to self-confidence. A well-read person is distinguished by high erudition, a broad outlook, he can always demonstrate knowledge in various fields, which significantly increases his self-esteem.
  5. An opportunity to improve your sleep and ensure a pleasant, refreshing awakening in the morning.
  6. An excellent help for the development of attention, memory, thinking, and ability to concentrate. So if you want to improve your intelligence, start falling in love with reading.

And what is especially important is that thanks to books you can learn to understand other people and get to know yourself.

Of course, you have your own answer to the question “why is it important to read books.” Perhaps you really enjoy the meditative state you enter as you “swallow” page after page. Or literature is your best motivator, inspirer. Perhaps your favorite works make you laugh and captivate you. The main thing is that reading brings joy, gives strength and a piece of magic.

Remember:

Conventionally, people are divided into those who read books and those who listen to those who read. Which category do you belong to?

Interesting facts about reading and books

  • Previously, books were placed on the shelf “in reverse”: with the front edge outward, the spine facing the wall. They were often chained to shelves.
  • The most favorable age for teaching a child to read is 6–7 years. Later, it is more difficult to teach reading.
  • It takes +/- 475 hours to write a novel.
  • Behind bars, books such as “The Prince” by Nicolo Machiavelli, “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, “The Prison Confession” by Oscar Wilde, and “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan were written/conceived.
  • 68% of all books are bought by women.
  • The average reading speed is 200-250 words per minute (2 pages per minute). Napoleon read at a speed of 2000 words per minute. Balzac read a 200-page novel in half an hour. M. Gorky read at a speed of 4000 words per minute.
  • The longest team read-aloud marathon lasted 224 hours (September 13-22, 2007)
  • Most readers lose interest in a book around page 18.
  • A bibliocleptomaniac is a person who steals books. The most famous bibliocleptomaniac is Stephen Bloomberg. He stole more than 23 thousand rare books from 268 libraries. His collection is valued at $20 million.
  • The term "bookworm" comes from small insects that feed on the spines of books.
  • The best selling book is, not surprisingly, the Guinness Book of Records! It has been translated into 52 languages ​​of the world. Recently, its sales exceeded 450 million copies.
  • The world's first heavyweight book is dedicated to the history of rugby in New Zealand. It was published in Wellington in several copies. Her weight is 50 kg.
  • The smallest book is the children's fairy tale "Old King Cole". Its size is one square millimeter. Circulation: 85 copies. Published in 1985.
  • The largest book in size appeared in 2004, in Russia. It's called "The World's Largest Book for Babies." Dimensions of the “baby”: 6 by 3 meters (the area of ​​a living room in a Khrushchev building). Masterpiece weight: 492 kg.

Should we force children, and even ourselves, to read? Why is interest in literature falling? Why read a lot, and what does it give? We will try to answer these questions in this article about books and reading.

Any statistics can confirm that interest in literature is noticeably declining. If in Soviet times we were still considered the most reading country, today Russia occupies only 34th place in the world ranking. The conclusion suggests itself. The meaning of a book in a person’s life is clearly changing. Authors change, ways of obtaining information, its media and accessibility change. But is it worth fearing and sounding the alarm?

This is how the famous writer Viktor Erofeev assesses the situation: “A huge number of people in different times They shouted that culture was ending. Apparently, in this generation it will end in the form in which we have imagined it for many centuries. An epidemic in the form of stupidity is coming to our planet. Such a fatal epidemic of stupidity."

Journalist Ivetta Smolyaninova recalls: as a child, my parents always said: “Read more books, otherwise you will never become a worthy person.” I still didn’t understand what “being a worthy person” meant, but this method worked for me. 10 years later, parents tried to instill a love of reading in the same way. younger sister. The result was unsatisfactory. The child was simply not interested in flipping through the yellowed pages with small text. “So, should I enjoy this?” - my sister was perplexed, looking at another book gift. This may seem surprising, but in a relatively short time, the value of the book and its role in the education of the individual have changed noticeably.

On the other hand, in bookstores, it’s actually becoming less and less common to see a queue for some new book release. Despite the fact that a huge number of books are published every day, all this variety seems to repel the reader.

“I remember very well these crowds at bookstores in the early 80s,” recalls musician Andrei Makarevich. “Back then, having Tsvetaeva’s three-volume work in her possession was considered a truly prestigious thing.”

Why is there a fashion for reading and the idea that only a person who is not a stranger to reading can be an intelligent and truly full-fledged person and member of society?

Below are several possible answers to this generally rhetorical question.

1. “Beded yourself with reading” in childhood. Aversion to learning, required reading programs are now associated with something unpleasant. I don't want to go back.

Some people think that the period of absorbing information has passed, now it’s time to do something different.

2. Books have powerful competitors (TV with hundreds of channels, the Internet, social networks).

3. Too much work, too little free time. A tired person has no time for books. At best, it’s TV that you can watch while doing your own thing.

But how can you rest or relax here?

For reference: per day, seven leading channels show “160 fights, 202 murders, 6 robberies, told 302 negative news” (according to statistics from the Russian House magazine, May 2009).

4. The present time requires activity, even hyperactivity. Many people think so. Otherwise, they will overtake, otherwise someone will come to success first. We fuss a lot and cannot stand inaction, believing that only actions lead to results. Although, as a rule, the ability to think and eat required quality in achieving the goal. Reading requires temporary inaction, but are we ready for such sacrifices?

We turn to a book for a purpose. Some because they have nothing to do, some because it is a learning task, and some are looking for answers to questions in books.

Our life was unthinkable without reading. People read for different reasons. They read in order to obtain new information necessary for life and work. Reading takes a break from everyday worries, distracts you, and broadens your horizons. On at the moment, entertaining reading is given the palm. A person experiences a lot of stress throughout the day, and negative emotions accumulate. Mental tension. And “light reading” helps you relax and relieve tension, immerse yourself in another life, country, century... Reading enriches you emotionally.

Real literature helps you live more fully. A person often looks in books for what he lacks in life. Or the book reflects what is happening in his soul, in his life.

The generation that will not read Chekhov, Turgenev, or Jules Verne will grow up cruel and cynical. At the beginning of summer, the All-Russian Center for Study public opinion(VTsIOM) conducted research that the powers that be somehow did not notice. But in vain.

Their results are such that at least two ministries - culture and education - need to press all the “panic buttons” and hold emergency meetings of the cabinet of ministers. Because, according to VTsIOM polls, 35% of Russians DO NOT READ BOOKS AT ALL! But Russia, if you believe the speeches of the president and prime minister, has taken the path to innovative development. But what kind of innovations, scientific breakthroughs, development of nanotechnology, etc. can we talk about if more than a third of the country’s population has never picked up a book in a year? None, not even a failed detective! AiF decided to figure out why Russia, once the most reading country in the world, stopped reading and how this threatens society.

Sergei Kapitsa: “Russia is being turned into a country of fools”
VTsIOM data suggests that we have finally achieved what we have been striving for all these 15 years - raising a country of idiots. If Russia continues to move on the same course, then in another ten years there will be no one left who today even occasionally picks up a book. And we will get a country that will be easier to rule, from which it will be easier to suck out natural resources. But this country has no future! I uttered these exact words five years ago at a government meeting. Time passes, and no one even tries to understand and stop the processes that lead to the degradation of the nation.

We have a complete disconnect between words and deeds. Everyone talks about innovation, but nothing is done to make these slogans come true. And the explanations “I work so hard. When else should I read?” cannot serve as an apology. Believe me, our generation worked no less, but there was always time to read. And labor productivity in society several decades ago was higher than it is now. Today, almost half of able-bodied youth work in security organizations! It turns out that all these young guys are stupid, limited people who can only punch people in the face?

Where does the Volga flow?

You ask why a person should read at all. Again, I’ll give an example: the human and monkey organisms are very similar in all their characteristics. But monkeys don't read, but humans read books. Culture and intelligence are the main differences between man and ape. And intelligence is based on the exchange of information and language. And the greatest tool for exchanging information is the book. Previously, starting from the time of Homer, there was an oral tradition: people sat and listened to the elders, who in artistic form, through tales and legends of past eras, passed on the experience and knowledge accumulated by the generation. Then writing arose, and with it reading. The tradition of oral storytelling has died out, and now the tradition of reading is also dying out. Take it sometime and, at least for the sake of curiosity, leaf through the correspondence of the greats. Darwin's epistolary legacy, which is now being published, consists of 15 thousand letters. Leo Tolstoy's correspondence also takes up more than one volume. What will remain after the current generation? Will their text messages be published for the edification of their descendants?

I have long proposed changing the criteria for admission to higher education institutions. No exams are needed - let the applicant write a five-page essay in which he explains why he wants to enter a particular faculty. The ability to competently express one’s thoughts and the essence of a problem demonstrates a person’s intellectual background, level of culture, and degree of development of consciousness. But the Unified State Exam, which is used today, cannot give an objective picture of a student’s knowledge. It is built only on knowledge or ignorance of facts. But facts are not everything! Does the Volga flow into the Caspian Sea? The answer to this question deserves not a tick in the appropriate box, but a separate serious conversation. Because millions of years ago the Volga flowed not into the Caspian, but into the Sea of ​​Azov, the geography of the Earth was different. And the question turns from a textbook into an interesting problem. To solve it, it is precisely understanding that is required, which cannot be achieved without reading and education.

Feelings instead of minds

The question of losing interest in reading is a question of what is happening to people now. We have reached a very difficult moment in the development of humanity as a whole. The pace of technology development today is very high. And our ability to comprehend all this and live wisely in this technical and information environment lags behind this pace. The world is now experiencing a very deep crisis in the sphere of culture. So the situation in our country is quite typical for the rest of the world - in America and England they also read little. And such great literature that existed in the world 30-40 years ago no longer exists today. Nowadays, masters of minds are generally very difficult to find. Perhaps because no one needs minds - they need sensations.

Today we do not need to change our attitude towards reading, but to radically change our attitude towards culture as a whole. The Ministry of Culture should become the most important of all ministries. And the first priority is to stop subordinating culture to commerce. Money is not the purpose of the existence of society, but only a means of achieving certain goals. You can have an army whose soldiers will fight valiantly without demanding reward because they believe in the ideals of the state. Or you can have mercenaries in your service who will kill both their own and others with equal pleasure for the same money. But these will be different armies! And in science, breakthroughs are made not for money, but for interest. Such a cat's interest! And it’s the same with major art. Masterpieces are not born for money. If you subordinate everything to money, then everything will remain money; it will not turn into either a masterpiece or a discovery.

In order for children to start reading again, an appropriate cultural situation must exist in the country. What defines culture now? Once upon a time, the Church set the tone. On weekends, people went to church and instead of watching TV, they looked at frescoes, icons, stained glass windows - at illustrations of life in images. Great masters worked at the request of the Church; a great tradition illuminated all this. Today people go to Church much less, and television gives a generalized picture of life. But there is no great tradition, no art here. You won't find anything there except fighting and shooting. Television is engaged in the decomposition of people's consciousness. In my opinion, this is a criminal organization subordinated to anti-social interests. There is only one call from the screen: “Get rich by any means - theft, violence, deception!”

The issue of cultural development is a matter of the future of the country. The state cannot exist if it does not rely on culture. And he won’t be able to with just money or military force strengthen its position in the world. How can we attract our former republics today? Only culture! In the era of the USSR, they existed perfectly within the framework of our culture. Compare the level of development of Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics - the difference is huge! And now all these countries have fallen out of our cultural space. And, in my opinion, the most important task now is to return them to this space again. When the British Empire collapsed, culture and education became the most important tools for restoring the integrity of the English-speaking world. The British opened the doors of their higher education institutions to people from the colonies.

First of all, for those who could later become managers of these new countries. I recently spoke with Estonians - they are ready to study medicine in Russia. But we charge them a lot of money for studying. Despite the fact that they get the opportunity to study in America or England for free. And how can we then attract the same Estonians so that interaction with us becomes more important to them than interaction with the West? In France, there is a Ministry of Francophonie, which promotes French cultural policy in the world.

In England, the British Council is considered a non-governmental organization, but in fact it pursues a clear policy to spread English culture, and through it, global English influence in the world. So cultural issues today are intertwined with issues of politics and national security of the country. This important element of influence cannot be neglected. IN modern world increasingly, science and art, and not resources and productive forces, determine the power and future of the country.

I

I’m not afraid that people will stop reading or, especially, writing. In America alone, 8 million bloggers hysterically scribble notes in the margins of their simple lives. (They remind me of the magazine “My Machine Gun” mentioned in the “Republic of SHKID”, which was so called not for its militant character, but because it was published often.) I also don’t believe in the complete liquidation of the book, because I can’t imagine anything more convenient: cheap, cheerful and without batteries.

Moreover, I do not see a tragedy in the fact that the electronic book will soon tear itself away from the paper original and begin an independent life on the screen of every computer. Let us remember that literature, and the best - from folklore to literature, knew how to do not only without books, but even without writing. Therefore, in all the coming changes, I am actually afraid not only of the death of the book, but of its consequences - the future fate of reading itself, which the rapidly advancing digital revolution promises to radically control.

Although the cultural cosmos seems the same; immense, like an ordinary one, you can measure both.” If astronomers are able to calculate the size of the Universe, then archivists know how much information we have accumulated throughout our entire history, from the Sumerian tablets to the Night Watch. Namely: 32 million books, 750 million articles,* 25 million songs, three million TV shows, as well as 100 billion web pages. Today all this could fit in a modest barn the size of a rural library. But soon all the knowledge of the world will fit into one iPod. I then the great democratic revolution makes each of us the master of the second - digitized - world. The question is, what will we do with it?

In this perspective, I am afraid that the computer will kill not so much the book as its idea, i The remaining pages without binding do not necessarily need to be read all and read in a row.*

Instead of the promised world library, a forest of quotes awaits us. Digital literature* will turn into an equal information* mass, which can only be navigated by the Internet. Of course, the search device I will helpfully offer us selections on the desired* topic - how much sunlight weighs, how to replace* a toilet bowl, and what Gogol wrote about utribes. But “to tell us about this, Google and its company* must dismantle all the books in the world,* returning them to the verbal protoplasm from which the author sculpted and built his opus.* The gigantic difference between ordinary and computer reading is that the second allows us to find out only what we need. Monitor -* servant, well-trained butler, laconically answering* questions asked. The book is a teacher, a mentor: it also answers those questions that we didn’t think to ask it.

Of course, there were books before that almost no one read from cover to cover. The most famous is the Bible. In our country it was long replaced by Lenin, whose every work was only a fertile field of quotations, which anyone was not forbidden to tear up. (My favorite is the “bigger half”, which a desperate reference book on Rosenthal’s stylistics set out to justify.)* However, the trouble with any universal book is that; that it resembles a telephone line: it’s stupid to read it from the first page, but you can read it from any page.

Just recently did such literature seduce you? a reader freed from the dictates of the author. But this anarchic freedom did not last long.

There are a myriad of ways, Pavich complained to me, to read the Khazar Dictionary, but no one uses them.

It turns out that, in essence, I am mourning not the book, but the binding. However, it is he who creates composition, hierarchy, discipline, in other words, civilization. We willingly sacrificed it for the sake of culture, a rebellious element that despises any bridle. But this happened earlier - in the romantically daring 19th century. Today, in our 21st century, frightened by the return of barbarism, it has become clear that culture is civilization. Considering form to be content, it reveals to us not the essence of things, but their order. It is not “what” that matters, but what goes after what.

To learn this lesson, one must overcome the childhood temptation to rebel and calmly surrender to tradition. The book teaches how to read it, the law - how to live, God - how to die, the obituary - how to bury. New York, 2004-2006 Alexander 1enis ZEN OF FOOTBALL and other stories Editor Kocharova N. S. Art editor Kuznetsov V. K. Proofreader I. N. Mokina Technical editor Gerasmova N. N. Computer layout Anishchenko Yu. B. Signed for printing 02/07/2008. Format 70x100/32 Typeface “New Baskerville”. Conditional oven l. 10. Circulation 7000 copies. Order No. 1338 All-Russian product classifier OK-005-93, volume 2 953004 - scientific and industrial literature Sanitary and epidemiological conclusion No. 77.99.60.953.D.007027.06.07 dated 06.20.2007


This file was createdwith BookDesigner program[email protected] 22.07.2008